A Thought Never Unfolds in One Straight Line

Whether we conceive of exhibitions as narratological spaces with grammar and syntax,[1] or as intellectual working spaces,[2] the fact is that our understanding of exhibitions has shifted from static, temporary constellations of art objects gathered in a dedicated space, to performative sites where the art objects become agents, interacting among themselves, with their audiences, and with the various discursive contexts that are implicitly or explicitly present or presented. Furthermore, exhibitions are increasingly understood as sites for knowledge production, for research, and as having their own discursive agency. They are not merely the outcome of a curatorial research done by a dedicated expert, but in and of themselves sites where various modes of research and various modes of thinking are enacted. Much like we can think about, with, and through art, we can think about, with, and through exhibitions. In tandem with this new understanding of exhibitions, or rather of its ontological potential, the idea of the curatorial as a new epistemological paradigm is rapidly taking hold.

In the Making, of Objects, Artists, and Publics

In 1818, at the end of a celebrated teaching career, Joseph Jacotot found himself in a curious position. Exiled to Brussels and knowing no Flemish, he faced the predicament of teaching Flemish students who knew no French. Resourcefully turning to a bilingual edition of The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), Jacotot discarded his habitual role of disseminator of knowledge and instead directed the students to the text, from which they successfully instructed themselves. Born of necessity, the teacher-as-explicator model was displaced by the educator-as-facilitator who framed an experience for student-centered learning through individual experience and collaboration. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière recounts Jacotot’s pedagogical adventure and expounds upon the implications of learning being independent from instruction.[1] This includes the conviction that everyone has equal and unlimited potential to learn, beyond existing bodies of knowledge and the delimiting authority of power structures.

What’s in a Name? Questions for a New Monument

What is the contemporary condition of the monument? In relation to the current issue’s discussion of immersive and discursive exhibition practices, this essay places itself at a slight remove; rather than to analyse and evaluate specific curatorial strategies it seeks to raise questions of relevance to such practices and begins by moving the discourse out of the museum and into the public space. The point of interrogation here is the monument, a form with a particular capacity to tease and expose the triad we find at the core of any curatorial discourse: the relation between institution, artwork and audience. Following an introductory reflection on how to describe and define a ‘monument’, a term so broadly used it all but loses its value, the text proceeds to examine three cases, Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, Dakar (2010), Danh Vo’s WE THE PEOPLE (DETAIL), various locations (2010-13), and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, New York (2013). The sequencing of these geographically and culturally diverse works makes way for an interrogatory piece of writing that addresses the question of permanence versus temporariness of the artwork as exhibition (and the exhibition as artwork), and that of the political agency of the artistic form. Probing the social agency of the monument, the text draws lines between the symbolising capacity once held by modern sculpture and the oscillation between immersion and discursiveness as two complimentary modes of communication. The discursive content or function of the monument (i.e. what it commemorates) is activated through the viewer’s personal, immersive encounter with its form, a form that potentially places its viewer as a participant to the construction of its message rather than as a mere receiver.

To Touch and Be Touched

In my article, I will present as a case study the collection exhibition shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in 2016.[1] The starting point for the exhibition was the metaphor of touch. As a concept, touch is ambivalent: it is more intimate than sight, which has been the traditional metaphor for knowledge in Western thinking. Yet touching is also about grasping or understanding, as in it we are taking hold of something. Our curatorial team, Eija Aarnio, Arja Miller, and myself, was interested in touch early on, because with it the distance to the observed is lost: when touching something we, too, are being touched. To be clear, we did not want to create an exhibition where spectators are actually able to touch. Instead, we were looking at the collections of the museum and searching for artworks that would “touch” us—works that were able get under our skin. While forming the conceptual core of the exhibition, our curatorial team recognized a tension in the way in which “touchy issues,” affects and emotions, are perceived in our society. On the one hand, we were interested in emotions and affects raised by the artworks. We wanted to focus on the immersive dimension of the art that seems to escape verbalization, a dimension that makes use of the multisensory experience and addresses the viewer in a direct manner. On the other hand, we also became aware of how society in general has been taken over by an emotional surge. If previously feelings and emotions were not meant to be shown in public, today they have become commonplace. What was emotional and affective seems no longer to be private, but shared and public.[2] In fact, strong emotions seem to be a prerequisite for success, be it a matter of reality television or politics. This is also connected to the search for extreme emotions and experiences, an aspect we felt needed to be included in the exhibition—not the least because in museums’ competition for audiences, the experience-laden works are often seen as an answer.

Between the Discursive and the Immersive – Editorial

How can exhibitions function as mediums for research? How can artistic research contribute to art museums? What is the research value of immersive exhibitions? What is the role of the sensory experience in gathering and disseminating knowledge in the museum? What is the function and position of public programs as curatorial models for research and knowledge production? And how does the public contribute to the museum’s knowledge production?

For Whom Do We Write Exhibitions? Towards a Museum as Commons

In 1979, Umberto Eco published The Role of the Reader (Lector in fabula), which gathered the analysis he had conducted in the previous years on audience participation in the enjoyment of narrative literature. According to the Italian semiologist, a text always implies a set of rules as well as undefined empty areas, which are set up by the producer and activated by the receiver. As a matter of fact, according to Eco, any text has inscribed in it, since its very conception by the author, an interpretative mechanism that makes it incomplete. Every text therefore always implies—or at least hopes for—a subject able to decode it. Breaking down the act of textual communication as an act based on shared codes and conventions—some of which are more stable, like languages; others are less codified, such as a set of references or contextual readings—between producer and receiver, Eco delineates the theoretical character of a Model Reader, for which every communication produces postulates and proposes more or less knowingly the following: “To organize a text the author relies upon a series of codes that assign given contents to the expression he uses. To make his text communicable, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by his possible reader. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible reader (Model Reader), supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions, in the same way as the author deals generatively with them.”

Painting Into A Corner: The Pedagogic Agenda, the Immersive Mediation (and the Overdetermined Experience) of ‘Play Van Abbe 4’

Play Van Abbe 4: The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flâneur (and the Worker) (2011), the final installment of the experimental, Play Van Abbe program at the Van Abbemuseum – invited viewers to play one of four ‘roles’, each of which entailed a different mode of engagement. The pilgrim sought divine inspiration, the tourist an encounter with something unusual. The flâneur strolled along in passive observance while the worker, not merely a consumer of experience, produced in return. To engender these perspectives role-specific ‘tools’ for art mediation were extended to the exhibition’s visitors. While not explicitly fetishized on pedestals or in vitrines, mediation was the overriding object and subject of Play Van Abbe 4. Works such as Richard Long’s Wood Circle (1977), James Lee Byars’ Hear TH FI TO IN PH Around this Chair (1978), and Oliver Ressler’s What is Democracy? (2009), functioned merely as a backdrop. Each of the artworks included could have been exchanged with any other. In such a situation it is imperative to ask: in the midst of so much discursive and immersive mediation is there any space left in the museum for art?

Vestiges of 125,660 Specimens of Natural History

As vestiges of 125,660 Specimens of Natural History, we have selected a number of images and photographs to relay some impressions of the exhibition 125.660 Spesimen Sejarah Alam, which we curated in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2015, and which Anna-Sophie also presented at the “Between the Discursive and the Immersive” conference, held at the Louisiana Museum later that year.

Discursive versus Immersive: The Museum is the Massage

We live in an age in which everyday life is suspended within countless overlapping flows of information. Each of these overlapping flows operates as an immersive environment and as a discursive system of detection, analysis and visualization. To put it simply: all Google users, which is to say all users or all humans, since we have been redefined as users and we’re only valuable in as much as we are users, are treated simultaneously as researchers and consumers. Perhaps it is time to rephrase Barbara Kruger’s truism I shop therefore I am, into I research therefore I am.

Visitor Voices Between the Discursive and the Immersive

In December 2015, the Stedelijk Museum and the Louisiana Museum of Art convened a conference entitled “Between the Discursive and the Immersive – Research in 21st Century Art Museums.” Taking the Design Museum, London, as a case study, my Pecha Kucha explored how the museum’s public programs might be understood to create a discursive mode of visitor engagement, constituted through the interplay of visitor and institutional voices. This discursive mode can be encapsulated by the notion of a museum doing its thinking in public. Thinking in public provides a propositional space for critical engagement and reflexivity, and positions the museum as a forum for public engagement with design and its wider contexts. However, as suggested by the conference title and by a variety of other papers given over the two days, the museum also invites visitors to engage immersively with content, in particular through the curatorial strategies in the exhibition environment.